Posts by Graham Bartlett

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Re: The more of this I read @IAproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

You'd be truly amazed how easy it is to run an engine. Remember that back in the early days of cars, there were no carburettors or anything that sophisticated - all they did was blow air over the surface of a puddle of fuel, and hope evaporation picked up enough. And it worked.

As for points, old cars used whole lot more juice on the spark than they ideally needed. The result was spark plugs and points wearing away as the zaps vaporised small bits of metal each time. Spark plugs were a 5000-mile/6-month service item on my old Montego. These days spark plugs are a 10-year-service item, and that's more because they simply don't know how long they'll keep running so they take a guess.

If you want fuel economy *and* performance *and* the car to run at altitude, that's where it gets tricky.

"he has such a big heart"

Re: Anyone else like the old way better?

Thanks for the link to a website which tried to force a spyware download on me, dickhead. And an opinion based on cars that started down the production line in 1997, meaning design started about 1994. Way to go for up-to-date information.

But I'll still answer your fact-free opinion, because I started working on car engine controllers in 1999 and spent roughly 10 years on and off since then on that, and I particularly spent a lot of time on diagnostics. So unless you've worked through a diagnostics manual with the service team lead for a manufacturer, and been out testing your fail-safe strategies on a real vehicle on a test track, then I probably do know more than you. Let me count the ways that things have improved...

You don't have to change sparkplugs any more. When I started driving, sparkplugs were an every-year service item. Now they're usually a 100,000-mile service item. Entirely down to replacing the points with electronics. Oh, and the points, and the vacuum-advance carburettor, and the carburettor generally, and spark-plug leads on most modern cars with coil-over plugs - all gone, and all their failure modes with them. My Renault Laguna starts in the morning, every time, no questions. My old Austin Montego was not so user-friendly. And the Laguna will happily get 45mph at 80mph, where I'd be lucky to get 30mph from the Montego at that speed. My Laguna is only an 2005 plate, incidentally - hardly state of the art.

Temperature sensors, and speed sensors on various bits of the drivetrain. Time was that these went wrong on a regular basis, and if you were lucky then you could limp the car to a garage, and if you weren't then it was a tow-truck job. Now that all these sensors are available, the engine controller can cross-check them to see whether any look dodgy, and do something sensible if there's a problem.

Theft of cars, there's another improvement. These days that's seriously rare and mostly confined to old cars from pre-immobiliser days. If you want to steal a modern car, you either need the key or you need some wireless immobiliser cracking kit which is well beyond your basic brick-through-the-side-window brigade. Theft from cars is right up - all those people leaving satnavs in the glove box - but theft *of* cars is very low.

Ditto radios. No-one much buys aftermarket radios any more, because they're all built in. Which means no-one is going to break into your car for the radio any more, because they have sod all resale value.

And that's before we start talking about all the features - ABS, airbags, traction control and the like - which have saved the lives of more people than you'll meet in your life, and which are only possible because of electronics.

Visible improvements? Well, these days your car generally "just works". Perhaps it's not "visible" to you, but that's only because you aren't correctly remembering what old cars were like. Yes, there are still design faults in cars, because cars are designed by humans and cockups happen, and manufacturers won't fix them unless they have to. Congratulations for spotting that. So I'll just say "Ford Pinto" and let you fsck off quietly with your little Beemer bug.

In the same way as every kid who's just got their license drives like they did when their instructor/parent was in the car with them. They'll swear blind that they will, and then they'll swear blind afterwards that they stuck to the speed limit. And anyone who believes them is an idiot.

And the "abstinence-only" stuff just makes it worse, because then you're handing the keys to someone who hasn't even been taught basic safety. Like car crashes, ignorance is more likely to get you into an accident than to keep you out of one.

Re: The other thing to remember

That's the problem at the moment. The stuff is still out there, but not in enough concentration to make it worth mining, unless the price

Pig farming is a very bad analogy. Pigs reproduce. Minerals do not.

Where we actually are is berry-picking in Autumn. All the ones near the path get picked first. Then you go looking under the thorny bits for any more around there. Then if you're really keen, you might consider carrying a stepladder over to get the ones higher up. And inevitably there'll be some right up in a tree which are out of reach of anyone except birds.

When it comes to minerals, we've nailed all the easy ones round the paths. Some minerals are still at the "look under the thorny bits" category. Some have stepladders up already. And some (notably coal) have long precarious ladders up trees (which occasionally give way and kill people) to extract the hard-to-reach ones. When people will pay £100 per berry, it's worth the risk.

It will rarely be cost-effective to get 100% coverage. You probably won't send a helicopter drone around the top of every tree to individually pluck single berry, so some will still be left there.

Re: ... IoT devices generally have no real world advantage over their dumb counterparts ...

Requires, no. Might be nice to have, perhaps.

Say I'm coming home early on a cold day, I turn the heating on when I leave work instead of coming back to a freezing house. I can see that being an advantage. Turning the kettle on at the same time might be overkill though, yes.

Re: Impossible Testing Scenario

As to "inherently unsafe", that depends on whether parameters do need testing in combination. Some will, some won't. No testing strategy, not even for safety critical software like medical equipment, requires testing of every possible combination of individual states. If you think that's a problem, you don't understand ALARP.

Good architecture should minimise linkages so that you *can* trace what can affect what. If you don't have good enough engineers to design a robust architecture, then you have bigger problems than just the testing.

Re: nonsense article and "common sense"

Common sense might tell you that a mechanical device spinning at umptytum RPM is less reliable than solid-state. If you're slinging that mechanical device around in your handbag, or clipping it on your arm to go for a jog, then sure.

But leave them both in an immobile PC, and bets are off. If you're not aware of manufacturers specifying expected write-cycle lifespans for flash, then you don't know about the main cause of failure of one of these. If in addition you are using the SSD as the main (or only) drive and you haven't got temporary files being put anywhere else, then you're not aware of the main reason you'll burn through those write-cycles. In short, if your only comparison is mechanical-vs-solid-state then you don't know enough to have an opinion on the subject.

Re: Dalton's Bond...

Absolutely.

And prepared to kill anyone with anything. The wait-the-whole-film payoff with the cigarette lighter was rather nifty. Or in "Living Daylights", instead of continuing to beat up on the guy hanging off his leg on the plane, he just cut the laces on his boot. That's the kind of style that Bond hadn't had since Connery, and didn't get again until Craig. Moore and Brosnan were only placeholders.

Re: Earth is 9,000 years old...

Especially since there's all those people (including politicians) who think that "Born in the USA" is about how great America is, just because it's in a major key and has a sing-along chorus. Go figure.

Re: Shortage of kangeroos/ collies/ dolphins?

Re: Occam

+1 on that.

As a one-time Occam/Transputer coder though, the main issue isn't race conditions and livelocks - it's deadlocks. A waits on B, B waits on A, neither gives way. But finding the silver lining, it's totally possible to statically detect this at compilation and warn the coder about it. At least, it is if you use a language like Occam where you can easily see what's going on. By the time you've baked the parallelism into a ton of nasty interface code though, it's all pretty gnarly and you're basically on your own.

Astronomers are looking in the wrong places

There's a better solution. If you live in California, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington or Texas (per Wikipedia), barratry is a misdemeanor punishable by prison time and/or fines. You don't even need to sue them yourself - it's a crime, so you call the police and hope for a DA who wants to get their name in the papers as "the man who arrested Microsoft".

Re: Grace Jones

Acting-wise, she is what she is. Arnie and Stallone weren't ever going to score Oscars, but if you wanted big muscles, they were the go-to guys. You wanted a woman who seriously looked like she could threaten the other guys, Grace Jones was it. (Not bloody Bridgit Neilson in "Red Sonja", thanks.)

And her singing is fantastic, not least because she can still do it at age 60.

Re: Think about it. Eleven.

Actually you *can* have more than 5 points of contact with a single hand. Place all five fingertips on the surface, then drop your wrist - you now have an extra point (actually an area) of contact with your palm heel.

Re: MIssing article

The invisible Aston Martin has to be top place, no question. I'm glad they stopped for a while after that, because they'd totally jumped the shark there.

But I'd say second place would be the magic pen that let Roger Moore breathe underwater. Sure it's possible to engineer artificial gills to pull dissolved air out of seawater, but it'd be the size of a house.

You could make a strong case for the laser rifles in Moonraker though, I guess, but that's pretty much narrative imperative when the film went all space opera.

Re: Surely that should be...

+1, except I'd put Moore in the "All the others" category.

Bond is a killer. Moore wasn't, and nor was Brosnan. Both of them were all gadgets and not much else, because they had nothing else going for them. The key thing about Bond as acted by Craig, Connery and Dalton is that although they have some cool gadgets, they're equally able to belt the crap out of someone with their bare hands. The only fight Moore's Bond ever properly won was with two girls, which says everything you need to know.

Also those guys were/are happy to be doing it themselves instead of relying on stand-ins. In "The Living Daylights", there's a fight on a Jeep. That's actually Dalton hanging off the roof by his fingers at 50mph on a mountain road, not some stuntman.

John Blanche, anyone?

"promote the understanding of IP"

I think you'll find that the folks over there understand IP pretty well - they just don't see what's in it for them. Which is precisely what the USA did with European inventions during the 1800s, and what China are currently doing with American inventions. Until China takes this stuff seriously, what chance do they think they've got of convincing somewhere like South Sudan that they should care?

Re: Pumping water up hill...

The problem with pumping water up hill is energy density - you need to move a lot of water a long way to store a lot of energy, and if you want to buffer *power* then you need to be doing it pretty fast too. Dinorwig uses two largeish lakes and an entire mountain to house the infrastructure, and it's still only just tickling the demand peaks in a relatively small, relatively energy-efficient country. Not really an option for places like the US, especially somewhere like Kansas where mountains are a bit scarce.

Like you say, flow batteries seem a better bet. More complicated, sure, but you're not dependant on having a spare mountain that you can hollow out.

Re: @proto-robbie

I'm afraid you're waving your ignorance around in a big way there. Fom a purely technical level, DC kicks AC's arse. Anything with AC behaves like a radio transmitter, and that saps power which you would rather be selling to your customers. DC simply doesn't. If you want to talk theory, there are reactive losses for AC (extra impedance due to capacitance and inductance) which just don't apply in DC-land.

There's a better reason why Westinghouse won the AC v. DC battle - and it's that if you don't have semiconductors, getting high-voltage DC back down to low-voltage DC is a seriously complicated procedure, and if you can't go high-voltage then you need much thicker cables. With AC though it's dead easy to use transformers to step voltages up and down, so back in the Westinghouse/Tesla days, it was AC all the way. But now we have these things called "transistors" and "diodes" which you may have heard of. In fact transformers are still more efficient than semiconductors, so local grids still use AC - but start pushing power over any real distance and AC gets proper f*cked from the extra losses in umpty-tum hundred miles of cable.

So since the 50s MOST long-distance links were HVDC, and since the 70s EVERY single long distance link was HVDC. Do yourself a favour and google "HVDC".

(PS. Yes, I did actually have a job at a place which designed and built HVDC equipment for national grids, once upon a time.)

FWIW I happen to agree with you on alternative sources and nuclear, although the fact that you can't rely on alternative sources isn't a complete disaster. If you've got a few days of storage lined up, you've got plenty of time to start ramping up those power stations which have been offline for the last month or two. All you need is to ensure that all the offline power stations can meet the nation demand if necessary. So it won't let you get away with fewer power stations, but it *will* let you cut their fuel bill pretty dramatically.

Re: An influx?

Nothing wrong with playing for exposure

That's a perfectly accepted way of getting your name known. You play support for someone whose music is similar to yours, so you're playing to a thousand people in an auditorium who you already know are likely to like your music. Cool, job done.

Joan Armatrading is currently doing this around the UK. Every show, she has a local singer-songwriter doing support. (Local to me, it's a girl called Alice Walker, who's seriously talented and deserves wider recognition.) AFAIK they're not getting paid, but they're getting their names out in front of a crapload of potential fans, and they're getting to hang out with one of their idols.

This is not quite the same for a horn or string section. Sure, you might get to hang out with one of your idols. But is *any* audience member likely to say "nice work on that cover of Strawberry Fields Forever, let's go and see the string quartet play Mozart next month"? (Hint: the answer is "no".) This is why session musicians get paid per job.

Re: cops did the same thing with craigslist

"I can be anything on the Internet"

Except apparently a normal, morally-sound human being. Nice one, kid.

Which is why I can't be arsed with aliases these days. I don't want to be Hitler or a little green crocodile when I'm online - it's enough trouble keeping one head going, without inventing new heads to put on! So I don't need anonymity, bcos there's nothing I'd say which I'd be ashamed of having quoted back at me.

Re: It doesn't take take thousands of years

Yeah, but that's still kind of inconvenient in many ways. There's a Heinlein (IIRC) book about a generation-ship where they finally get to their destination planet and find that a few centuries of research has resulted in a way of getting there in a half-dozen years. Or if we turn out not to be the only ones out there, the "Forever War" scenario of trying to strategise over centuries.

Re: @Law I need to lie down somewhere...

"Established and successful"...?

Never heard of the Dresden Dolls myself. Googling them, I see they managed two studio albums and one live album in a decade, and their act is *very* niche. They certainly haven't troubled public awareness to any great extent. And she's *so* successful that she can't afford to pay musicians on her tours...?

Neil Gaiman OTOH has been writing for over 20 years, and doing *very* well out of it. The "Sandman" comics were somewhat niche, sure. But his first novel "Good Omens" with Terry Pratchett did very well, and "Anansi Boys" went straight in at number one. He's won all sorts of awards. "Neverwhere" was a BBC series back in the 90s, before he adapted his own screenplay to a book. "Stardust" and "Coraline" have been filmed. He wrote the CGI film "Beowulf" a few years back (the Sean Bean/Angelina Jolie one).

So compare niche cabaret act with number one NYT bestseller author. Yep, "wife of" is about the shape of it.